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ENVIRONMENT '99 - Breaking the Green Barrier
Companies discover that being good to the environment can be good for business, too
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Business New Haven
8/9/1999
By: Abigail White
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Managing with a "green" mindset seems on its way to becoming the norm in American business, ensuring better truck with society and the environment. Can improved competitiveness be far off?
Stimulated by a growing number of state and federal regulations, businesses have made serious efforts to change their products and processes and become responsible "green companies." Often however, these changes have been tough to accomplish. Timing, available capital and size of operations have been determining factors for how quickly a company could achieve full compliance.
As the century draws to a close, one of the newer areas of management concern is resource efficiency. The result is a new type of technical progress that squeezes more output per unit of resource, rather than one that just runs more resources through the system.
The benefits to all this activity and effort has been cleaner air, improved water quality and increases in waste reduction.
"In terms of compliance with regulations I think generally companies are getting better. Therefore there's been less of that kind of business for us," says Denning Powell, president of Advanced Environmental Interface in Middlefield. "Generally speaking because people are more aware, compliance is improving.
"In addition," Powell continues, "with the economy being good, there's a lot more development going on, and with that, increased amounts of cleanup of sites in the state. There are a number of federal and state funds available for improvements in the environment.
"For example, there are federal funds available for distressed properties called the brownfields program," adds Powell. The state's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines brownfields as "abandoned, idled or under-used industrial and commercial facilities where expansion or redevelopment is complicated by real or perceived environmental contamination." Local communities often chose to adopt their own definitions for such sites.
Under this program, developers are encouraged to rehabilitate these sites and turn them into usable properties. Some of the money helps take care of environmental problems. "We're doing a fair amount of this work for New Haven in brownfields issues by helping to quantify the environmental picture involved with the sites they want to clean up," Powell says.
"The bulk of our work, however, is with existing facilities," Powell adds, "including underground tanks. There's a state fund called the Leaking Underground Storage Tank fund. The fund is run by [DEP].
"Aside from a $10,000 deductible, you can claim most of your cost for investigations and clean up - up to $1 million - provided that you kept the proper records and followed the prescribed regulations. We try to position our clients so they can take maximum advantage of regulation programs that are out there," Powell says.
"In addition to compliance issues, what we're seeing is that a lot of today's environmental management is connected to overall efficiency improvements and the desire to be competitive," says Marian Chertow, director of industrial environmental studies at the Yale University School of Forestry. "And if you want to be competitive, you can't have a lot of waste.
"If you're throwing pollution out the stack then that's not very competitive because you're wasting material," explains Chertow. "And if you're throwing away a lot that means you're buying too much to start with. We're also seeing that while compliance is a big driver, efficiency is a bigger and bigger driver. That's an exciting trend. It's a double-win to get more efficient and at the same time you improve your environmental management system."
"I have changed all of our printing equipment and processes at least five times since 1960," says Lou Weady of Guilford's Royal Printing. "Starting with hand setting type, we went through a number of different processes to finally getting more computerized. Eventually we'll be able to go from computer to plate: the technology is already available; but it's just too expensive for my business right now."
In addition to changes and upgrades in printing and copying equipment, Royal Printing has switched its printing inks and solvents to more environmentally friendly ones. "For solvents we've met and surpassed all OSHA requirements," Weady says. "All our inks are now vegetable-based inks with the exception of the gold and silver inks, which are metallic inks. And we're using water-soluble chemicals for our plate cleaning and cleaning of the blankets we use to clean the plates. We're not using any of the chemicals we were using even three years ago.
"We don't have the spillage we used to have, and the waste is now reclaimed," he adds. "The toner cartridges, for example, are self-contained and the whole thing gets sent back to the manufacturer and gets refurbished and refilled by them.
"I thought that when we got computerized we'd use less paper," Weady adds. "I'm using more paper than I've ever used. We have 275 to 350 sales per day and with that, I've seen less in terms of business forms, but doing more publishing-oriented work for people. Consequently it just shifted with there being more home-based businesses and people telecommuting a few days a week for their companies."
To accommodate these customers Weady has to continue to buy the latest software programs for publishing, as well as extend business hours to remain competitive. "We watch and listen to how [clients are] operating and try to dovetail what we're doing with that."
"With all the things going on with the EPA and the government - regulations getting stricter and stricter - people think that this holds back economic growth while more effort is put into the environment," says Gregor Barnum, director of business development for New Haven-based RPM Systems Inc. "That's not really correct. If you look at it from a 'design for environment' way, you can make your product less environmentally impactful and economically still have growth.
"How you begin to develop technology so that you're using less and less resources but getting more and more out of them - that's what the basis for 'design for environment' is."
Howard Brown started RPM Systems in 1980. Brown originally began his career working with Buckminster Fuller and later taught at Yale.
"Buckminster Fuller had the pursuit of doing more with less, so a lot of Howard's ideas were focused around that," Barnum explains. My interest was with how to get this out into the corporate world. So we're primarily involved with developing environmental management systems and environmental information systems designed to help companies manage all their data and monitor their entire environmental impact. In business integration, what you have is the wall between business and environment either becoming transparent or becomes less and less.
"Here's an example," Barnum explains. "We went to Duracell and compared what you get out of the battery - a little piece of electricity - with what goes into it, and it is so grossly different that you begin to think about how to make it now so different. In other words, the question from the concept of design for environment would be: Are you really in the battery business, or are you in the portable energy business? And if you are in the portable energy business, what do you need to do to get it so that the product becomes not only portable energy but becomes so much more efficient.
"Now if you could design this thing so that it has very little resource input but has very strong output - i.e., portable energy - that applies the 'doing more with less' idea. They loved it.
"With design for environment as part of business strategy," Barnum adds, "and that's the whole concept in this business integration idea: designing products with future R&D that require fewer resources to be put into it and on the other end, get more and more out of it."
"Businesses have realized that it is not in their interests to create waste," Yale's Chertow says. "It costs them money and it's not money they can always control.
"We recognized that as the environmental movement progressed that the role of business and industry was crucial in maintaining and improving the environment," says Chertow, "so in order to explicitly recognize that we began the Industrial Environmental Management Program at Yale in 1990. We have a pretty active program within our master's of environmental studies and we work with all kinds of groups: large businesses, small businesses and not-for-profits, in Connecticut and New England.
"One big change that we're seeing is that for the first thirty years of the environmental movement things were pretty much driven by compliance. In the last few years, the regulatory pressure has been less intense, in part because of changes in politics, and there have been true improvements in the environment as well."
Of course, improvements in the environment are not always measured in air and water quality. Advances in something as seemingly elementary as fan technology also play a role. Ansonia-based Lemont Aircraft Corp. (LAC) combines aerodynamics and acoustical engineering to design efficient mechanical products for the built environment.
"What we have is an integrated system," explains LAC Vice President Andrew Lemont. "It's a propeller inside a ringed housing, and the efficiency comes from the interaction between the housing and the fan. You get more flow with at least a 30-percent reduction in noise."
Andrew Lemont and his father Harold founded LAC in 1989. The senior Lemont worked in the aircraft and helicopter industry for 50 years as an aeronautical engineer. "My father works more in the performance end of it and I work in the noise-reduction end of it," explains Andrew Lemont. Details of current LAC product offerings can be found on its Web site: home.att.net/~alemont/Index.html.
"One of our products, the Augmented Fan, is used for electronic cooling," Lemont says. "It's a new, low-noise fan that can be used inside computer work stations, like the ones made by Hewlett Packard. In the fall we'll be launching an integrated Augmented Fan and Heat Sink product.
"As everything gets more dense in the computers," Lemont explains, "what's called circuit density, the more the internal heat goes up around the computer's processor. Within the next five years, with the advancement of processing capabilities, if you plot the air needed to cool the processor you're running at a noise level at 70 decibels - as high as a vacuum cleaner. Our product advantage comes in with three times the efficiency of anything that's on the market. Our cooling ability can last [in technology time] up to the year 2012. We can carry the life out without resorting to the more exotic technology as currently being predicted by the industry to be needed four years from now," Lemont says.
"One of the things I think we're be seeing in the future is that you'll have to change the argument for how to sell your product," Chertow says. "New products and new companies that are selling products because it helps with efficiency are right now in a transition of having to figure out a new way to market their products.
"With all I see I'm optimistic. I think we play a strong role in the national and international pictures. I also think that while the economy's good people will continue investing in efficiency and overall reduction of waste."
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